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December 08, 2005

Gwydion vs. The Sudoku At the End of Time

Gwydion Suilebhan

I've just ended a torturous, brief, passionate love affair, and I'm greatly relieved.

My now-ex-girlfriend's name is Sudoku, and if you've never met her yourself, I hope you never do. She's an international sensation, a mathematical genius with a pleasing symmetry. Almost everyone who meets her falls immediately and hopelessly in love.

She is, of course, a game. No, more than a game: a riddle, written in numbers, that only a strict application of numerical logic will solve.

Let me tell you more about her. (Actually, I'm going to let Wikipedia do it for me.) Sudoku is "a logic-based placement puzzle," the aim of which is "to enter a numerical digit from 1 through 9 in each cell of a 9×9 grid made up of 3×3 subgrids." (Think of a tic-tac-toe board with miniature tic-tac-toe boards inside of each square.) It's deceptively simple; you stare at it thinking you REALLY ought to be able to figure it out easily, but it just gets harder with every square you solve.

On two occasions last week I lost a couple of hours trying to solve a fiendish-level sudoku. But when I finally finished the second one, I felt... hollow. The numbers all started to look the same. I thought about how silly the completed grid was when set against the filled-out Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle, which I finish most every week. There was no knowledge required to fill out the grid, just the ability to hold several possibilities in your mind at the same time. Should that square be a seven? Wait: if it's a seven, then the eight in the next row has to be wrong... which is right?

And that, perhaps, is the key to why sudoku's so popular. It's not about esoteric bits of knowledge, which are harder and harder in our increasingly knowledge-filled world to hang onto -- it's about large amounts of undifferentiated data, which we seem to have ample quantities of in the age of the internet. Sudoku requires the solver to sift through information, not to have any on hand.

If you'd like to sift through some yourself, I recommend the online version at the Times of London website. But if you're like me, you'll find yourself spending less time there after a while. I may be living in the age of information, but I don't have to like it. I'm built to store knowledge, not find it.

Posted by Rock Heals at December 8, 2005 12:40 AM